Secured Instant Messenger
How do you plan to market your secured IM to both the private and public sector?
(RK):We will be promoting the Secured Instant Messenger from our search engine, Blowsearch.com, our banner/pop network, AdOrigin.com.
Will it run on Apple systems as well as Windows platforms?
(RK): We have versions coming out later this year that will work on Apple and Linux. The current version works on most Windows Operating Systems.
Mozilla's Firefox is rapidly gaining on IE's major market share. Are there plans to develop secured IM technology that will run with other browsers?
(RK):Our secured IM technology is not browser dependent...it is a stand alone application and will use any browser installed on a users machine.
Blowsearch Toolbar
There are some concerns that the Blowsearch toolbar is invasive. Can you address that?
(JH) The BlowSearch Toolbar software was created by our strategic search partner InfoSpace. Our toolbar is essentially a dual copy of the toolbar which InfoSpace distributes through its many Web sites. Even the code, updates, and support for the toolbar itself are solely maintained and provided by InfoSpace. It is merely branded as BlowSearch and all of the search functionality displays BlowSearch results.
So, if the InfoSpace toolbar is not classified as adware or spyware then why is the BlowSearch Toolbar classified as such? InfoSpace or DogPile's toolbar (Infospace owns Dogpile and they use the same toolbar we do) as a malware application. Nor do any of those anti-spyware sites display the Google, Yahoo, or MSN toolbar as adware or spyware. Our toolbar is just as non-invasive as all of those other companies.
Blowsearch.com Search
How many listings does your search engine currently cover, and which search engines feed you your results?
(RK)We have over 1000 direct customers on our PPC network and growing. We have five Account managers and one sales manager building and maintaining our customer base...with 4 more starting in March. For our meta results we pull from a total of 27 search engines they include: Yahoo, Google, Taoma, Kanoodle, Looksmart and more.
What other developments is your company working on at this time?
(RK):We just relaunched our banner network, AdOrigin.com. That gives four areas for us to focus on: PPC Sales, Search Engine Affiliates, Banner network, and BlowSearch Secured Messenger.
How does Blowsearch see itself in comparison to the "big boys" of search engines (google, yahoo, etc.)? What are some plans for the future?
(JH): BlowSearch is a middle market search engine and one of the fastest and most reliable meta search properties online. We take the best search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and 25 others), combine their results, re-rank based on relevancy, and remove the duplicate listings. BlowSearch gives users the best results available from major search engines. It's really more like "search multiplied". Multiple engines, with one click.
We don't have to be a Google, Yahoo!, or Ask Jeeves. Users come to us when they want the best results from all the engines without the hassle of extra browser windows and extra digging to find what they want online. That provides high quality traffic for our growing list of advertisers and helps to build our network of publishers. We'll compete based on our ability to produce innovative technologies like the BlowSearch Secure Messenger and retain users longer than many other search engines our size. We don't want to beat the bigger engines at their own game, our goal is to join them.
Click-fraud is a major concern these days. Can you talk about Blowsearch’s new technology to fight this problem?
(JH): Our click fraud technology is still developing but Click Defender is poised to be the only solution offered by any search engine that can detect and eliminate fraudulent traffic before it reaches the advertisers site. With the click fraud problem growing BlowSearch is already on the cutting edge of the issue going where no other pay per click network dares to go right now. We're addressing the click fraud issue publicly and offering our Click Defender Guarantee to back it up. The technology will come out of BETA shortly and has been much talked about in the industry already. Our technology for click fraud is automated and real time. Where as all of our competitors address this issue with silence and the standard "click fraud is under control" statements when the entire industry knows that is not the case.
Thank you, Joe and Richard, for taking the time to answer these questions.
